This year’s Sustainability Science Best Paper Awards are the first selection from our bimonthly issues, representing excellent research that covers current and future priorities for sustainability science, namely, transdisciplinarity, understanding social-ecological interactions, and understanding those interactions with an inclusive view of traditional knowledge. The winning papers are available with links below.

For this award we considered papers published in 2016 excluding note and comments, editorial, message article, and papers authored by a member of the committee. From a total of 62 eligible article published in 6 issues of 2016, three winners (1 outstanding paper and 2 honorable-mentions) have been chosen following our selection process. Our advisory board and selected editors are encouraged to nominate papers from the clusters based on the article topics. The nominated papers are then ranked based on reviewer impressions and downloads, among other criteria, and then are hand-selected by our selection committee. This time three papers stood out for us from the rest, and again I congratulate the authors for their hard work on this significant accomplishment. I also thank Richard Bawden from Systemic Development Institute of Australia and Jeffrey I. Steinfeld from Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their help on the selection committee.

We believe that the authors deserve recognition for diligent work beyond citation count and other article metrics. Conversely, this serves as an indicator for our readership to find high quality, new research publications. This award provides acknowledgements to the winning paper in the form of an award plate, certificates, and a 200 euro book voucher from Springer for the winning authors. The winning papers will also be available with free access for 2 months as of the September issue publication.

The winning papers are:

Outstanding Article

For the paper entitled

The role of learning in transdisciplinary research: moving from a normative concept to an analytical tool through a practice-based approach. doi:10.1007/s11625-016-0358-4

Authors: Lotten Westberg and Merritt Polk

May 2016, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp 385–397

Honorable mention

Human responses to social-ecological traps. doi:10.1007/s11625-016-0397-x

Authors: Wiebren Johannes Boonstra, Emma Björkvik, L. Jamila Haider and Vanessa Masterson

November 2016, Volume 11, Issue 6, pp 877–889

Honorable mention

Local ecological knowledge and incremental adaptation to changing flood patterns in the Amazon delta. doi:10.1007/s11625-015-0352-2

Authors: Nathan Vogt, Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez, Eduardo S. Brondízio, Fernando G. Rabelo, Katia Fernandes, Oriana Almeida, Sergio Riveiro, Peter J. Deadman and Yue Dou

July 2016, Volume 11, Issue 4, pp 611–623

I extend my congratulations to all the winning authors.

Kazuhiko Takeuchi

Editor-In-Chief